Finnish startup Polar Night Energy has teamed up with a local district heating company to build an industrial-scale thermal energy storage system in southern Finland. The sand-based system will use soapstone, a by-product from the manufacturer of fireplaces and heating stoves, as storage.
Previously, Polar Night Energy had already created and launched a similar thermal installation with a power of 100 kW and a capacity of 8 MWh of thermal energy, so it has experience and working technologies too. The previous demonstrator was a vertical heat storage with a height of 7 m and a diameter of 4 m, based on ordinary sand, only cleaned of dirt. The new installation will be 13 m high and 15 m wide. At its peak, it will produce 1 MW of thermal power and store up to 100 MWh of thermal energy.
There are other differences between projects. The demonstrator accumulated excess thermal energy from the heating system and from the operation of servers. The heat exchanger was immersed in sand in the center of the tank, and there were no other heat sources. In the new project, the thermal storage tank will be heated by excess electricity from a solar or wind power plant. The stored thermal energy should be enough to meet the needs of the Porninen community in southern Finland for a month in the summer and a week in the winter, thereby serving about 5 thousand people.
Instead of sand, it was decided to use a slightly more heat-intensive solution – crushed waste from a local manufacturer of cladding made from a heat-intensive material such as soapstone or soapstone. The project will take 13 months to complete. Switching to “sand heating” will reduce heating-related greenhouse gas emissions in the community by 70%.
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